Now you've obviously played the games yourself and probably also checked Wikipedia of the NFS Wikia, but I'm still going to list some things that set High Stakes apart from its predecessor, feel free to take inspiration from or ignore completely.

High Stakes was the first NFS to include damage, and it would actually affect the race, from driving in the dark with broken headlights, to making your car slower and harder to control, the worse the damage got. Although you couldn't actually 'total' your car enough to end the race, at its worst you car would slow down to crawling speed, and you would hear explosions from your damaged engine backfiring. This was carried over in Porsche Unleashed, but in later games damage would be absent or only visual, until the Shift games, I think.

High Stakes definitely had a more European flavour to it. In NFS3 HP, all the tracks were more or less North American (US/Canada) with countryside, desert, forest, and Miami-style city (Atlantica) style tracks.In HS, some tracks were visibly located in Germany, France and the UK, complete with police forces in the correct liveries and sounds (two-tone sirens) - in the two British tracks (Celtic and Durham), the traffic even drives on the 'other' side of the road. This trend would continue even more in Porsche Unleashed, which took place entirely in European locations (Normandy, Corsica, Autobahn, etc.)

NFS3 had an option that let you race online via IP connection, but NFS:HS was the first where you could race online via EA's own servers, the EA racing network (this also continued with NFS PU, possibly also HP2, I'm not sure). This boosted the popularity for online racing for NFS games considerably, with communities that focused on online competition as a result. Needforbetterspeed.net was one such a community. When EA racing was discontinued in 2003, devoted fans created their own online matchmaking tool with the IPlounge. THis was also the source for the Stock Pack and Expansion Pack for NFS HS.

A subtle difference between NFS3 and 4: NFS4 would punish you more for cutting corners than NFS3, it seemed. In tracks like Snowy Ridge there are 'curbs' in several corners, that will slow you down slightly if you drive over them. NFS3 is a lot more forgiving in this area.

Modding definitely was a big feature in NFS3 and 4. At its high point (the early 2000's), there were literally hundreds of NFS-related websites, big and small, offering add-on cars and tracks. It may have been one of the most popular games to create mods for of its era (okay, maybe not like Quake or Unreal, but still). For a while, a German PC gaming magazine would devote a page each month to the best NFS3/4 mods.

One of the things that made it popular, I think, was it's open structure. This meant that you could add cars (up to a maximum of 50) thus expanding your car roster considerably. Many later NFS games that were made moddable thanks to the efforts of the fan community such as Underground 1-2 and Most Wanted, always made you overwrite a specific original car.

The relatively simple graphics also made it easier to get into for beginning modders. If you want to make mods for modern racing games now, you'd already have to be a professional 3d designer because everything is super detailed and photo-realistic. Many modders quickly surpassed the quality of the in-game cars, and a few (Eric Arroyo, Martin Leps, Endo for example) actually went on to become professional vehicle designers for games.

Eric Arroyo was actually hired by EA themselves, to work on Motorcity Online. Are you going to cover that game too, by the way? Although it lost the 'NFS' from its name (it originally was supposed to be a regular Need for Speed chapter) it's still very closely related to NFS3/4. One the other hand, it being online-only, pay-to-play, and only available in the USA, it may not have reached the wide audience that the normal NFS games have.

Thanks for your info Remko. Very very helpful indeed.

It's a shame that I could not be able to be part of the high point of NFS HP or HS 16 years ago. I was a stupid 10 year-old kid back then. And, to make matters worse, internet was still a novel thing to most of the ppl in China. It's fortunate enough that I got access to games like NFS that early.

Now Im able to make videos about my fav game franchise in USA while coming to places like NFSADDONS and meet veteran players like u guys, which is really fascinating if you think about it.

So please, if possible, you and other good guys are always welcome to give me suggestions or lessions on NFS. My analysis series is going to cover from HP all the way to Carbon which means Im gonna keep bothering u guys for a very long time lol.

Anyway, I do have some questions regarding your feedback:

1. it seems like NFSHP & HS had become a huge thing for German gamers. What factors caused this? I found this rather interesting.

2. So does the polularity of NFS for German gamers only stay between HP and HS or ppl love NFS as a whole? I really cant find enough data that tells a world-wide-level demographics of where NFS fans come from.

3. Where exactly is NFS HS based in? I can tell from the police car and siren that the game is based in Europe but not sure where specific tho.

4. where I can find analysis on NFS HS's car physics? I noticed that they added some sort of suspension travel to cars in HS which is new to the series. But most cars, especially super cars like Mc F1 GTR, sit a bit too high. They look like SUV sometimes in the game. I want to know wat causes that and if car's body frame and chassis are separately made/modeled.

First of all .. please accept my apologies for my initial ungracious reaction onto your thread, I didn't know about your history .. must have been hard growing up in China with all those restrictions in those days .. sorry for that!

Your questions are in so far eligible then and other than myself you might have gotten already appropriate information from other members

Not to excuse my reaction but to make it somewhat more comprehensible there were times being so many so-called freaks and experts concerning NFS around that sometimes you thought they had written the 'book of wisdom' about it.

That always was also the reason why I have registered rather late to a community ... although I have made cars (reworks to be precise) and other stuff just for myself already for a long time, but now it seems that NFS fan community -like myself- has now grown older and become a bit more 'wise' what makes it much more pleasurable to talk to people and exchange knowledge, experiences as well as files and also even work together instead of noticing a certain feeling of permanently having to compete or even living out foolish rivalry.

To your question(s): Well, as MADMAN already stated, the popularity of HP/HS can be explained by its customizability and versatility, if you know how to you can even create new tracks what isn't possible with later versions which also is a very attractive aspect of the game, not only to edit cars.

If you made some more experiences you will see then WHAT people already have edited (and still finding out what else more can be), from the policemen being around when you are being ticketed or the Police helicopter swirling around to even game sounds that can be altered with for example custom siren sounds as only a few to mention, let alone menu pictures and text as well as music and and .. what probably makes it -as to speak just for myself - very attractive for Germans since we like to profoundly examine (the so-called 'German thoroughness' -LOL) and alter things, tinker at and optimize .. but I'm sure that other people in other parts of the world also like to do such ...

Very well Written @ Frank, make a Long story shorter, this is what my email wad about, much yo a German friend last nite.. My phone is' Junk,, so I can't type no more,.were having Cold wind Storm,, today, Great day to Finish my Sweet new Road, Click,,Click,, Click: No-One else wants to Here..? they, doSo Peace Out brothers..!)

1. it seems like NFSHP & HS had become a huge thing for German gamers. What factors caused this? I found this rather interesting.

I don't really have an explanation for this, but yeah, it seems these games were particularly popular in Germany. At least as far as the modding scene was concerned. Being Dutch myself, I mostly hung around in the English speaking communities, and although there were also sites in other languages such as French or Spanish, the German scene seemed at least as big as the English one. Even today, of the few people left, a significant part are German.

Quote

3. Where exactly is NFS HS based in? I can tell from the police car and siren that the game is based in Europe but not sure where specific tho.

Actually, High Stakes isn't set in one specific location. If you go to the track menu (Location) page and scroll through the tracks, you'll notice it mentions the country in the top left corner every time: Scotland (Celtic Ruins) Germany (Landstrasse) USA (Dolphin Cove) and so on. Dolphin Cove, Kindiak and Snowy Ridge still have black-and-white pursuit cars with "weeoo-weeoo" sirens. Even the Raceways are set in different countries (Italy/USA/Spain) although this isn't really noticeable. As said before, all the original NFS3 tracks still take place in USA or Canada.

Quote

4. where I can find analysis on NFS HS's car physics? I noticed that they added some sort of suspension travel to cars in HS which is new to the series. But most cars, especially super cars like Mc F1 GTR, sit a bit too high. They look like SUV sometimes in the game. I want to know wat causes that and if car's body frame and chassis are separately made/modeled.

It's true that all the cars look to narrow and tall in NFS4 compared to NFS3 - I believe this was one of the thing people were disappointed in when the game came out.

There have been several performance tuning guides made for NFS3 and NFS4 editors, but of the top of my head I can't really say if the performance data was very different. In fact, I just used NFSwizard to compare the performance files of the Diablo from NFS3 to the one in NFS4, and they are 99% similar. I think it's just a visual effect which has been enhanced for NFS4.

First of all .. please accept my apologies for my initial ungracious reaction onto your thread, I didn't know about your history .. must have been hard growing up in China with all those restrictions in those days .. sorry for that!

Your questions are in so far eligible then and other than myself you might have gotten already appropriate information from other members

Not to excuse my reaction but to make it somewhat more comprehensible there were times being so many so-called freaks and experts concerning NFS around that sometimes you thought they had written the 'book of wisdom' about it.

That always was also the reason why I have registered rather late to a community ... although I have made cars (reworks to be precise) and other stuff just for myself already for a long time, but now it seems that NFS fan community -like myself- has now grown older and become a bit more 'wise' what makes it much more pleasurable to talk to people and exchange knowledge, experiences as well as files and also even work together instead of noticing a certain feeling of permanently having to compete or even living out foolish rivalry.

To your question(s): Well, as MADMAN already stated, the popularity of HP/HS can be explained by its customizability and versatility, if you know how to you can even create new tracks what isn't possible with later versions which also is a very attractive aspect of the game, not only to edit cars.

If you made some more experiences you will see then WHAT people already have edited (and still finding out what else more can be), from the policemen being around when you are being ticketed or the Police helicopter swirling around to even game sounds that can be altered with for example custom siren sounds as only a few to mention, let alone menu pictures and text as well as music and and .. what probably makes it -as to speak just for myself - very attractive for Germans since we like to profoundly examine (the so-called 'German thoroughness' -LOL) and alter things, tinker at and optimize .. but I'm sure that other people in other parts of the world also like to do such ...

Greetings and Welcome!Frank

Hey Frank, dont be sorry or anything. There may be some culture difference here and there giving us different background, but that's about it. It is the game that brings us together disregard nationality or race or childhood story right? truly amazing.

Anyway, I do remember once when i was around 11 or 12 which is 16 years ago at least, I played split screen with a older kid, he was like 17 years old already. He got so many (at least 10) modded cars added to the NFS3 HP. And I was stunned back then. There're helis, rally cars even UFO. I had so much fun that day playing with him.

What you and other ppl's feedback reminded me to think about current racing game genre as a whole crictically. I can not help but notice the lack of friendly, easy-to-learn modding feature that's available to all gamers like NFS HP, coming with the game itself(which is 99% impossible to happend today). I know, similation racing games on PC are mainly based on community moddling but that's a different league. NFS never intended to be simluation racing game and so do many other rac games. We simply cannot say that moddling is only a thing to simluation rac games right? It's a shame that console platform hugely impacted today's game developing process. A lot games, like 2016 NFS, is bascially made for console then tranffered to PC platform.

I feel like I have to make a sperate video just to discuss and talk about moddling as a whole for NFS and even to racing games. I was playing a community mod for Counter Strike:GO which is called CS:Classic Offensive that visually brough old 1.6 stlye into CSGO. Very interesting. Imagine if today's NFS is open source and open for community moddling, it wont be impossible for us to recreate NFSHP or HS on its frosbite engine (but back to realty, i dont even think frosbite is suitable for racing games at all. it looks amazing and thats about it)

But we still should have our hope, just like the hope on Half Life 3 lol

1. it seems like NFSHP & HS had become a huge thing for German gamers. What factors caused this? I found this rather interesting.

I don't really have an explanation for this, but yeah, it seems these games were particularly popular in Germany. At least as far as the modding scene was concerned. Being Dutch myself, I mostly hung around in the English speaking communities, and although there were also sites in other languages such as French or Spanish, the German scene seemed at least as big as the English one. Even today, of the few people left, a significant part are German.

Quote

3. Where exactly is NFS HS based in? I can tell from the police car and siren that the game is based in Europe but not sure where specific tho.

Actually, High Stakes isn't set in one specific location. If you go to the track menu (Location) page and scroll through the tracks, you'll notice it mentions the country in the top left corner every time: Scotland (Celtic Ruins) Germany (Landstrasse) USA (Dolphin Cove) and so on. Dolphin Cove, Kindiak and Snowy Ridge still have black-and-white pursuit cars with "weeoo-weeoo" sirens. Even the Raceways are set in different countries (Italy/USA/Spain) although this isn't really noticeable. As said before, all the original NFS3 tracks still take place in USA or Canada.

Quote

4. where I can find analysis on NFS HS's car physics? I noticed that they added some sort of suspension travel to cars in HS which is new to the series. But most cars, especially super cars like Mc F1 GTR, sit a bit too high. They look like SUV sometimes in the game. I want to know wat causes that and if car's body frame and chassis are separately made/modeled.

It's true that all the cars look to narrow and tall in NFS4 compared to NFS3 - I believe this was one of the thing people were disappointed in when the game came out.

There have been several performance tuning guides made for NFS3 and NFS4 editors, but of the top of my head I can't really say if the performance data was very different. In fact, I just used NFSwizard to compare the performance files of the Diablo from NFS3 to the one in NFS4, and they are 99% similar. I think it's just a visual effect which has been enhanced for NFS4.

U rock Remko!

Ur answers really helped a huge.

So for question 4, I think they just somewat modified a little bit on car dynamics for the 4HS compared to 3HP. [Lifting off gas and u will be able to turn in] is still a thing in 4HS so yeah, that's wat they did.

since the file is no longer available it seems I attached it here as a Word document ...

.. and then there's still that nice little tool called 'RealTuner' by erkberk .. helps calculating performances and driving values on real datasheets if you have them ... I usually get them from 'http://www.automobile-catalog.com' that's where you can find actual datasheets of most available cars either if modern or historic ..

Just a small contribution of mine but I also wrote a little tutorial of how to use RealTuner to recalculate certain drivetrain data in Carp.txt based on actual datasheets and how to 'backwards' calculate specific values to make it as realistic as possible ..May sound a bit complicated when you read it first but once you tried and did that yourself it becomes much easier and makes somehow clear how NFS works or 'ticks' concerning performance data ..

1. it seems like NFSHP & HS had become a huge thing for German gamers. What factors caused this? I found this rather interesting.

2. So does the polularity of NFS for German gamers only stay between HP and HS or ppl love NFS as a whole? I really cant find enough data that tells a world-wide-level demographics of where NFS fans come from.

3. Where exactly is NFS HS based in? I can tell from the police car and siren that the game is based in Europe but not sure where specific tho.

4. where I can find analysis on NFS HS's car physics? I noticed that they added some sort of suspension travel to cars in HS which is new to the series. But most cars, especially super cars like Mc F1 GTR, sit a bit too high. They look like SUV sometimes in the game. I want to know wat causes that and if car's body frame and chassis are separately made/modeled.

For 1. & 2. Interesting observation, what exactly gave you this impression? Well, im from germany as well. Its true there where many german sites back in the days, also there are many german authors.But i can't come up with an explaination for that.From my point of view it was generally a very popular game in the western hemisphere (USA, Canada, Europe). But as you can see in the thread Online-Resources of classic NFS titles, where we collect links to sites that still keep going until this very day, there is a big mixture of people from many different countries. Even in russia NFS3 and it's successor were/are pretty popular; im not even sure there was a russian retail version of NFS available...Counterquestion: Do you know if there is a modding scene for NFS present in china? Do chinese people generally prefer PC or consoles more? (i know many game cracks are made by chinese hackers *cough*)

I can just tell you that i often played that game with my buddies in split screen mode. Since we had just limited internet bandwith in 1999, the split screen mode was much appreciated. My family, and most of the people here, just had a dial-up modem - no way for online-gaming. So that was the only way to play together. I don't want to praise this feature too much, because playing with 2 players on 1 keyboard was horrible, but we had fun anyways Since Split-Screen was very rare in PC-games that might also be a factor why the old NFS-titles were favoured a longer time until everyone had proper web-access. Just a wild guess tho

Point 3. was explained by Remko - nothing to add there.

Well, regarding point 4. for the pc-version, the game-engine seems to take a lot of data into account but that doesn't mean the outcome is realistic.The wheels are not modeled seperately, you immediately loose control of the car once a side of the car looses contact to the surface. Either you have full road contact or the car will start "grinding". So i think there is no real suspension modeled, its more or less a "visual effect", making the car body shake.But maybe the handling specialists or car makers can enlighten us with more details here.

.. also a speculation of mine ... what you described is so far true some isn't .. I had tried to study and become wise of Justin Martin's tutorial .. well first of all there is one great difference between HP/HS and later versions concerning car physics. While in later versions (like already with NFS Porsche, too for example) each wheel's state (position, turning, grip etc.) was being calculated separately HP/HS still only 'sees' the car 'as a whole' except for roll and nick of the body what gives you the impression of 'losing control' when entering e.g. a side stripe defined as 'grass' or 'gravel' surface etc. so there only 'is' or 'isn't' traction like you stated correctly other than in HP2 (I never had Porsche but it uses the same physical model or 'engine' I believe) where then at least two wheels had full traction to the road still.

What I also consider very strange is the fact that in a jump = 'big air' you instantly loose speed what is physically wrong since the sheer mass of the car should propell you forwards .. (called 'Conservation of Energy' physical law)

Anyway.. what I stated at the beginning is the following: Justin Martin discovered several relations between different values in Carp.txt, and as long as you stay on a road much different values or entries for the car handling are valid than on surfaces with less grip (or 'no surface' at all like in a jump) just the transition from one state into the other appears or feels much more drastically than in later versions it seems.That is also the reason why AWD works properly (but using then negative values in 'front drive ratio' entry in the gearing/engine tab though like he is recommending in his tutorial) on other than dry solid and plain road surfaces)

The overall physics of HP/HS isn't quite as bad as always being considered but car performance tabs weren't made such exact or realistic at that time like with later versions ..

I remember when editing HP2 cars where for example the engine's torque curve was being almost as exact as the real one ..

You notice a certain change when you start correcting those sometimes very well meaning HS car data by actual values from datasheets to something more realistic, like when of cars that you think you know well you sometimes even become a little disappointed if your most beloved racing car suddenly feels more like a 'poS' ('pudding on squabble' .. what else did you think?) -LOL

1. it seems like NFSHP & HS had become a huge thing for German gamers. What factors caused this? I found this rather interesting.

2. So does the polularity of NFS for German gamers only stay between HP and HS or ppl love NFS as a whole? I really cant find enough data that tells a world-wide-level demographics of where NFS fans come from.

3. Where exactly is NFS HS based in? I can tell from the police car and siren that the game is based in Europe but not sure where specific tho.

4. where I can find analysis on NFS HS's car physics? I noticed that they added some sort of suspension travel to cars in HS which is new to the series. But most cars, especially super cars like Mc F1 GTR, sit a bit too high. They look like SUV sometimes in the game. I want to know wat causes that and if car's body frame and chassis are separately made/modeled.

For 1. & 2. Interesting observation, what exactly gave you this impression? Well, im from germany as well. Its true there where many german sites back in the days, also there are many german authors.But i can't come up with an explaination for that.From my point of view it was generally a very popular game in the western hemisphere (USA, Canada, Europe). But as you can see in the thread Online-Resources of classic NFS titles, where we collect links to sites that still keep going until this very day, there is a big mixture of people from many different countries. Even in russia NFS3 and it's successor were/are pretty popular; im not even sure there was a russian retail version of NFS available...Counterquestion: Do you know if there is a modding scene for NFS present in china? Do chinese people generally prefer PC or consoles more? (i know many game cracks are made by chinese hackers *cough*)

I can just tell you that i often played that game with my buddies in split screen mode. Since we had just limited internet bandwith in 1999, the split screen mode was much appreciated. My family, and most of the people here, just had a dial-up modem - no way for online-gaming. So that was the only way to play together. I don't want to praise this feature too much, because playing with 2 players on 1 keyboard was horrible, but we had fun anyways Since Split-Screen was very rare in PC-games that might also be a factor why the old NFS-titles were favoured a longer time until everyone had proper web-access. Just a wild guess tho

Point 3. was explained by Remko - nothing to add there.

Well, regarding point 4. for the pc-version, the game-engine seems to take a lot of data into account but that doesn't mean the outcome is realistic.The wheels are not modeled seperately, you immediately loose control of the car once a side of the car looses contact to the surface. Either you have full road contact or the car will start "grinding". So i think there is no real suspension modeled, its more or less a "visual effect", making the car body shake.But maybe the handling specialists or car makers can enlighten us with more details here.

Greetings

haha. Where should i start. It's a relatively large topic if you wanna get to know Chinese gaming community. In general, I will say gaming community is better than chinese professional racing scene. The similarity between these two is that they both started relatively late. It started around very late 80s or preferably early 90s. But gaming back then is mainly Nitendo's FC (& its copied versions) + PC games (which were mainly pirate games). I dont wanna touch base too much on pirate games so lets just say it's mainly due to ppl's economy status. They just wanna play affordable games. There're barely any offical imported games with proper translation, so ppl just went ahead with the *cough pirate ones.

Things are a lot different today. We have offical consoles in the market, both PS4 and XBox1, all official with translation and everything. But i will say the majority of the players remain on PC. PC DIY is very huge in China and believe or not, most PC hardware in China is not expensive at all. In fact, they are sometimes cheaper than wat I get here in United States (amazon, newegg etc) which surprised me a lot! And steams, yeah, tons of ppl started to purchase games from steam. They even have special sales only for Chinese steam market. way to go Gaben.

Meanwhile in terms of actual gaming. Competitive gaming wins the majority. LOL, Overwatch, CSGO, SC2 etc are wat most ppl have been playing currently. Still, close to Japanese gamers, there're still a good number of gamers tend to focus on less mass-fan-favorite games. And we do have gamers who devote a lot into game analysis and stuff. Maybe not as detailed or thorough as Germans but good amount of effort i will say.

As for the car physcis, very interesting. Im still trying to read through Frank's last response tho haha, so much info!!!

I only got into all this because a friend at school told me there were unofficial addons for NFS... The rest is history.

The first website I DLed a mod from was NFSCheats I think back in 2001. But the most fun I had was at NFSCars... I was a lurker until 2006 but I was there since the FilePlanet era. Comment sections of addon cars were quite heated... And most mods from the era were inspired by FnF using Ryuji Kainoh cars without permission. There must've been 4 or 5 versions of the FnF Supra, the worst being from Kremit who couldn't write a CARP worth a damn. Not sure if he was the person who made the Audi TT Quasar but that car looked worse than a load of horse dung and still had problems with menu view. Good times...

Soon after came the scratch made cars with ZModeler development so those edited cars became obsolete, the ricers were forced out of the website (some like Fivespeed and BubbaChubs embraced the scratch 3D scene and evolved as modders). The HOF in NFSCars was introduced in 2002, I believe, with the celebration of Jake's first Lamborghini Murciélago. Up until around 2006 there have been many modders who came and went, after that the Germans took over as the forefront of NFS modding, with Team RSR achieving the highest level possible. Nowadays it's mostly conversions with the odd scratch made car here and there, but that's to be expected because the old tools are archaic and the readily available models save a lot of time. Still, conversions have always existed, Viper did tons of them, Krystoff did a bunch...

The physics of NFSHS are simple but due to some crazy experiments I did a long time ago I fully believe it's possible to create fairly realistic cars in the game... It would require people to tone the AI down a bit, though.